In a forthcoming report, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Economist Sam Schulhofer-Wohl debunks the traditional notion that underwater homeowners are tethered to their homes, unable to sell and so restricted in their ability to move elsewhere.

At issue is a paper published by the National Bureau of Economics Research, widely cited by those who adhere to its conclusion that underwater homes act as anchors on their owners’ mobility.

The paper analyzed a nationwide sample of homes. Since 1985, the Census Bureau tracked housing units across the country, returning every two years to record who lives there. If the home is owner-occupied on one visit, then two years later there are four possibilities: The house is occupied by the same owner; a different owner; a renter; or is vacant.

All renters or vacancies were dropped from the data in the original paper – only homes with a different owner were counted as a “move.” The authors did this on purpose, with the explanation that housing mobility has conventionally referred to permanent moves where an owner sells a house and never returns. Using this measure, the researchers found that underwater homeowners were almost a third less likely to move.

But Schulhofer-Wohl wasn’t as willing to dismiss the renting and vacant outcomes.

If an out-of-work homeowner is desperate enough to consider moving to secure work, we think that homeowner is going to do what it takes to get there. If that means renting his underwater home to another family and using the proceeds to help pay his mortgage while he rents (or buys) somewhere else, so be it.

Additionally, if a new job opportunity is so great as to afford a homeowner the ability to maintain an underwater mortgage on her former home and live someplace else – leaving the former home vacant until it recovers enough value to be saleable – so much the better.

Or maybe a homeowner simply walked away from an underwater home, again leaving it vacant. Disturbing as it may be, this happens all the time, too.

Knowing this, Schulhofer-Wohl found that if you included all the renter or vacancy cases that were excluded from the original study, people with negative equity were actually more mobile than those with positive equity.

Imagine that.

But just as succesful individual homeowners will find a way to escape the weight of their underwater homes when necessary, so too must lenders themselves demonstrate the agility and innovation required to unburden themselves of underwater loans.

Underwater properties aren’t just the problem of their owners. It’s not enough for a bank to simply say “Caveat Emptor” and leave upside-down borrowers to their own devices.

Come on. Get creative on us, banks.

How about trying out a kind of rent-to-own program for those borrowers who want to sell their underwater homes, but can’t? Let prospective buyers rent the property from the bank for a predetermined amount of time, using the rent payments as both an indicator of the renters ability to pay and accruing them toward a down payment, with the express understanding that after that time, it becomes theirs.

Yes, there are a number of potential problems with the idea – obviously, lenders make poor landlords – but it’s difficult to convince us, especially given the number of renters looking to buy but unable for any number of reasons, that there isn’t demand for a program like this.

Or maybe we’re way off base. That’s OK too. We’re only trying to start the discussion. We know there are plenty of very smart executives and policymakers out there who can trump any idea we come up with.

And we challenge them to do just that. Think outside the box. Dump conventional wisdom – it’s not doing anything for anyone anymore.